Revisiting "Rules for Radicals"
Saul Alinsky and where we are at in our moment of social protest
There’s nothing more beautiful than having one’s social media feed dominated by images of a sea’s worth of gleeful, loud protestors taking over the streets across our country. Thanks to all the weekend family obligations, I wasn’t able to join in person, but I couldn’t take my eyes off my social media scrolling through the wonderful and often hilarious posters. But even more so, I’m heartened by the shear numbers that came out. 5.2 MILLION PEOPLE! That’s roughly 1.5% of our entire population. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it IS. It’s just a third of the way to 3.5% which is the magic number when it comes to creating social change.
It’s called the “3.5% rule” where a campaign that mobilizes 3.5% of a population for sustained protest is likely to become successful. It’s also presumably why the Alt National Parks Service (who seem to have become the defacto leaders of the resistance) have called for an even bigger turnout next time around—making 3.5% of the U.S. population. That’s around 119 Million people! If you think of all the people who couldn’t make it out there (like myself, I have a lot of like-minded parent-friends who couldn’t make it) and all the people who are just realizing the necessity and power of public protest, we have that number.
But we can’t just stop at the physical act of going into the streets. The 3.5% rule is not just a one-day thing. One day of people hitting the pavement is a start, but getting one day of 3.5% of people in the streets isn’t the change itself. Rather it is sustained resistance that we are looking for. And it is with this thought in mind, that I picked up my dog-eared and highlighted copy of Rules for Radicals by the legendary organizer, Saul Alinsky.
Alinsky was an activist and organizer in Chicago organizing poor communities to demand changes from the elite classes—landlords, bankers, politicians, business leaders, etc. From 1938 until his death in 1972 he dedicated his life to organizing and activism and developed tactics that went against the activism of the times. It’s called “The Alinsky Model of Organizing,” Pauline Hassan Burkey & Kokayi Kwa Jitahidi of the Othering & Belonging Institute explain. “[The Model] centers on identifying and confronting issues within a community and addressing them in the public sphere through development and organizing. Community members participate, lead, and engage in change-making, rather than acting as observers. At its core, the model utilizes building relationships as central to building enough power to effect change.”
What Alinsky’s method does is engages people in democratic engagement. They are working towards collective rights on a day-to-day basis instead of relegating democratic action to once every two-to-four years of voting. It’s also a relational approach to organizing.
I was introduced to Alinsky in college during a “Rhetoric of Social Protest” course I took from my favorite professor and advisor, which is where I acquired my copy of Rules for Radicals. Alinsky published it in 1971 and as a 19 year-old reading it in 2001, the book was somewhat mind-blowing to me as it illustrates how essential communications based on relational connections as the most important aspects of organizing and activism. But in truth I haven’t picked up the book in years and this weekend’s protests inspired me to go back to Alinksy’s words. I wanted to put this moment into a historical moment.
Written during another urgent and terrible time—amidst an illegal war in Vietnam and social protest rising up all over the country—Alinsky calls to the next generation of activists to invest in their communities and to double down on our democracy. To be honest, I got emotional reading the prologue—both with sadness that we’re at such an urgent moment and with hope. He wrote it over a half-century ago and it feels we’re even more dire times as we see our democracy crumbling in front of our eyes. But he explains how we got to this place and that we have a path out of it. He writes:
“The democratic ideal springs from the ideas of liberty, equality, majority rule through free elections, protection of the rights of minorities, and freedom to subscribe to the multiple loyalties in matters of religion, economics, and politics rather than to a total loyalty of state. The spirit of democracy is the idea of importance and worth in the individual, and faith in the kind of world where the individual can achieve as much of his potential as possible.
Great dangers always accompany great opportunities. The possibility of destruction is always implicit in teh act of creation. Thus the greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
From teh beginning the weakness as well as the strength of the democratic ideal has been the people. People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of common good by all of the people.”
The TL;DR version of this is: if we get lazy and take our democracy for granted, we’re gonna lose it. And if we don’t see our fate wrapped up in the fate of other people’s, then we’ve gotten democracy all wrong.
We are in a moment where we need to see collective systemic change and we have an opportunity. More people than ever are seeing how our fragile our democracy is and how quickly our rights are eroded when we’ve let things slip over the decades. And that gives me hope. The people in the street give me hope, but so do the sustained boycotts of companies like Tesla and Target that are working, and the vast amounts of people deciding to run for office (Run For Something reported that 27,000 people have expressed interest to run for office between Jan 20 and March 11—that’s almost double the interest between the election and inauguration).
This is what the sustained action looks like. All of this—the protests, the boycotts, and the running for office—is what sustained action look like. And it’s beautiful. And I think we’re already probably at 3.5% when we look at all of this. But there’s a long way to go, but we got this.
As Alinsky also said:
“Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.”
So let’s keep making it hot, hot, hot!